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Signal Effect – A Test Puzzle [TSW]

Currently, I’m back into playing The Secret World and the game once more reminded me why it’s hands-down awesome. The way it mixes gameplay styles going from pure combat to defense, to mind-bending puzzles to platforming and stealth and then has a gripping setting and compelling storyline backing it up, I wonder sometimes why I ever leave the game.

And then I remember.

In The Secret World, it is entirely possible to spend an entire gaming session bashing your head up against one of their devious puzzles and not make any progress. It’s frustrating, as you know when you finally have time again and you decide to go back into the game, that puzzle will still be there taunting you.

Signal Effect seems like a good litmus test to show their deviousness. So here I will present to you the research part of the puzzle Signal Effect (without giving the answer away, of course). See if you can figure it out.

Down the rabbit hole…

Signal Effect

An odd transmission has been picked up. However, it’s not that strong. You are sent to find satellite dishes around the town and alter them so that they all point to the source of this transmission. You platform jump to find all 4 satellite dishes and point them in the right direction. However, each dish tells you different things when you search for the signal…

Got it? Okay. All the quest log states now is that in these transmissions is the answer on where to go next. So, let’s say you find the answer and head to the location given. There you find a box. This box needs a 4-digit code to open.

To finish the mission, what is this 4-digit code?

Space. The final frontier.

If you’ve solved it without looking up the answer (here), Congratulations! You’re a better person than I.

But… a SIDE-MISSION?! Really?! Compared to the big investigative missions that have multiple steps, this one is relatively short, but I still wouldn’t have called it a side-mission.

Up until this point I’ve enjoyed and have taken pride of the fact that I have not cheated or looked up any solution on any of the investigative missions so far, and the rush you get when you solve one is wicked and makes you crave more. I’ve even gone so far as when I’m researching to use the ‘-“secret world”‘ command in search engines to keep any spoilers from showing up.

But then I hit “Signal Effect”. In other missions, I’ve researched Bible translations going back to the 16th century, read full websites dedicated to fake authors, translated latin, used ISBN numbers as passcodes, and used children’s nursery rhymes to summon dark spirits. And the Morse code. Oh god the Morse code! The mission Signal Effect finally stumped me, though, and I had to look up the answer. It could be that the mission was misclassified, and was listed in-game as just a “side mission”, meant to only take up a few minutes, and so when I hit it near the tail end of the night I didn’t have the fortitude to solve it and, in a moment of weakness, looked up the solution.

I LOVE and hate those types of puzzles. I can almost never solve them, honestly. How far into the game do you need to get to start seeing the puzzles? I still haven’t “bit the bullet”. I am still awaiting a Steam Sales to buy #TSW and start playing! 🙂

The puzzles start almost instantly. In Kingsmouth, the first zone you’re sent to, has deep Illuminati ties and has some fiendish puzzles. Thankfully, in Kingsmouth, they’re all well marked by the questgivers. After that, every area has a few of them to solve. I think they’re awesome as they don’t apologize one bit for their difficulty, but then that also makes them really frustrating, too. Hmmm… Maybe if they switched it so every step of an investigative gave you XP instead of just the final…

Actually, some of the investigation missions do give XP at the different steps – I am pretty sure some of the Egyptian ones did that at least.

Signal Effect was also one I gave up on, partially because I had not saved and kept the information from the different steps – it was just a side mission… So, when I realized that I put it aside for a while to think about whether I should start over again, but in the end decided to look for hints to complete it.